James Anthony Froude

An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet

Ciaran Brady

An entirely original study on the life and writings of a hugely controversial and misunderstood Victorian intellectual

Based on a thorough investigation of the available sources, many of which have hitherto been unused or unattributed to Froude

Offers a new perspective on the debates and controversies, especially those surrounding Newman and the Oxford movement and the character of Carlyle

Offers a new interpretation of Froude's engagement with South Africa, Australia and New Zealand

Offers a new interpretation of Froude's controversial engagement with Ireland

Casts important new light on Victorian attitudes to the writing of History, to questions of faith and doubt and moral responsibility, to race and empire, to Ireland as a whole

James Anthony Froude

An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet

Ciaran Brady

Description

James Anthony Froude remains one of the most commonly referenced and frequently cited of Victorian public intellectuals. Known to intellectual historians as the author of a monumental History of England in the sixteenth century and more generally as a key exponent of Victorian religious doubt, he is also frequently referenced by literary critics and historians as the author of a series of scandalously provocative novels and of a major and hugely controversial biography of Thomas Carlyle. Historians of the British Empire and historians of Ireland have frequently been compelled to address his sometimes outrageous (but often representative) historical writings. Scholars of mid-Victorian politics have no less often turned to Froude as a typical representative of
Victorian fears of democracy, while more recently students of political thought have identified him as an early representative of a new form of Commonwealth civic republicanism.

Yet for all that Froude remains a strangely marginalised, fragmented, and neglected figure. Ciaran Brady now addresses this remarkable gap. Based on a thorough critical examination of all of Froude's published works (many of which have been discovered and identified here for the first time), and supplemented by intensive research into Froude's private and widely scattered manuscript materials, he offers the first sustained study of Froude's life and thought. Against the common assumption that Froude's life can simply be divided along simple lines - the sometime enfant terrible who aged into a respectable
man of letters - he argues that there was a deeper coherence underlying everything he wrote from the scandalous productions of the 1840s to the authoritative university lectures of the 1890s.

In addition to providing a study of a major but neglected nineteenth century intellectual, Brady offers a critical analysis of the impulses, the aspirations, and the unquestioned assumptions underlying the Romantic project of personal renovation, and an alternative view of that unique phenomenon known as 'the Victorian sage'.

James Anthony Froude

An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet

Ciaran Brady

Author Information

Ciaran Brady has published widely on topics concerning early modern history and on the general topic of historiography. He was joint-editor of the leading peer-review journal Irish Historical Studies (1992-2002), and was President of the Irish Historical Society (2005-2007).

James Anthony Froude

An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet

Ciaran Brady

Reviews and Awards

"Brady writes about even the most difficult material with consistent clarity and energy, and with a cool but generous relish for all aspects of Froude's enormous output. Froude's often outré, sometimes absurb and occasionally repellent political opinions and activities are expounded with insight and sympathy, and the portrait of the complex, gifted and exasperating individual that emerges is entirely pursuasive." --Eamon Duffy, Times Literary Supplement

"[A] rich slice of intellectual history as well as a memorable portrait of an impressive, if intermittently appalling, personality who left an enduring mark on Irish historiography, Carlylean biography and much else." --Roy Foster, Times Literary Supplement

"Brady has mastered not only Froude's own prodigious body of writing but also a vast, demanding literature on Victorian intellectual history. The result is an erudite and absorbing study, a masterclass of scholarly exegesis and lucid analysis. Brady's study may not make Froude any more appealing, nor his many offensive views and prejudices any more palatable, than they have hitherto been considered. But the work triumphantly renders Froude, the public historian and sage, more intelligible and infinitely more interesting than we may have assumed and, in the process, illumines large swathes of the intellectual landscape of Victorian England." --The Irish Times

"[Froude's] unpublished autobiography should have been called Disappointment. There is nothing disappointing, however, in this elegant biography." --History Today